This website is designed to be a reference to help British coin collectors identify various milled coins and their varieties minted from Oliver Cromwell to the current currency used today.
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With hundreds of colour pictures and hundreds of pages of information
about British coins. Whether you are looking for information about coin
collecting or coin values, you have come to the right place.
The use of coins in Britain dates back thousands of years to Celtic tribes which produced their own quite stylised coins. Their
currency was the gold Stater and the silver and bronze Unit's. Later during 43 A.D. the Romans began their conquest of England
and brought their own currency and coins to the land. After the Romans we move on to the Early and middle Anglo-Saxon
Kingdoms. Each kingdom minted their own coins and they did so by placing precut out prepared thin planchets of metals into coin
dies. The lower die would be set into a block and then the top die would be hammered down, squeezing the planchet in between,
imprinting it with the required design and thus producing coins. These coins are referred to as hammered coins.
The period of use for hammered coins is from around 600 A.D. to 1662 A.D. when milled (machine minted) coins became the
norm. The first milled coins in the UK were actually produced during Queen Elizabeth's reign in 1561 when a French moneyer
called Eloye Mestrelle introduced his method of using a screw press (as pictured on the left and right in the black and white
image above) which was powered by a horse. It is very similar to how some mills ground their grain so this method was nicknamed
"mill money" and this is where we get the term milled coins. These coins were of superior quality but they soon lost favour as
many workers were worried about losing their jobs due to the introduction of these "machines" and hammered coins were still
faster to produce.
We don't see milled coins being produced again for circulation until the era of Oliver Cromwell "Lord protector" and this is
where this sites focus starts from. Some collectors focus on hammered coins other on milled, some on both. I personally started
collecting milled coins first and started this website to focus on this type of coinage. Milled coins offer a plethora of choices
and types t collect and many sets would take a lifetime to complete.
The great thing about coin collecting is that you can choose the focus of your collection whether it be Pennies, Crowns, coins
from Queen Victoria's era or just a mixture of nice coins, hopefully you will find this website of some use.
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